Well, Sylvia Luke up and did it. Facing the inevitable — family pressures and bad polling — she pulled out of the lieutenant governor’s race. 

Someone on the website NextDoor said that now she can breathe a sigh. It shouldn’t be a sigh of relief, though.  

It should be a sigh of despair.

Because Luke is a victim of an impenetrable, way too long investigation that left her out on a limb, not knowing what exactly she had to respond to. There has never been an official word about her and that $35,000 or anything else involved in this farcical bribery investigation.

More important is that we are all victims of this truly awkward sixth grader dance of incompetence, avoidance and state failure.

So, she’s out of the picture. Big deal.

What are we celebrating? The fact that the bribery investigation started as long as 10 years ago with still no definitive information from either the feds or the state? The fact that when it comes to money in politics, with all the shouting and noise we nailed a small fish in a huge pond that the Legislature continues to avoid jumping in for fear they will drown?

All this hoopla of indignation and relief also makes us miss the fact that the way the Luke issue has played itself out is so much like other issues the state handles so badly: refusal to confront the core issues, long delays, and skirting around the fact that the hardest is yet to come.

Here is how the rest of us are victims.

As far as the bribery issue is concerned, it’s not a victory at all. Instead, it is another example of how inept or unwilling the state is with corruption investigations.

The bribery convictions of legislators Kalani English and Ty Cullen were federal investigations with proceedings in federal court. For that matter, so was the investigation and trial of former Honolulu Police Department Chief Louis Kealoha.

The Legislature chose not to conduct its own investigation of the recent $35,000 accusation and on Wednesday the House killed a public petition urging it to do so. The Senate had tabled the petition months ago.

Hawaiʻi’s attorney general’s investigation has produced nothing but promises and civics lessons about due process.

Luke’s leaving may seem like a vindication to you. To me it seems like state officials dodged a bullet.

Speaking of dodging a bullet, we are all victims because all this attention on Luke and relief about the results glosses right over the bigger issue, which is not corruption or bribery.

It’s the influence of money in politics, a much more gnarly issue that goes well beyond the exchange of money  in the obscured backseat of an SUV.

The influence of money in politics comes from the facts that much of it is legal, much in a gray area, and that powerful people can hire skilled lawyers who win cases carving out exceptions to rules.

Right now, our own Legislature is busy carving out its own exception to rules that could limit the impact of money. As they have done over and over in the past, our present legislators are moving carefully and daintily to craft a law that applies new political donation rules to elected state government officials. But guess what? Not, in most cases, to legislators.

Luke’s dropping out is a drop in the bucket, and when it comes to the real problem, a drop in the wrong bucket anyway. 

You’ll never find large successful construction companies getting caught furtively handing money over to some chump legislator in a Toyota. Why bother? Those big players have better ways, legal because the laws themselves offer those players opportunity enough.

So here four ways that the Luke situation should trigger a sigh of despair.

First, in all the excitement, the long-term issues remain untouched.

Second, even this Luke solution had nothing to do with the state’s ability or good judgment.

Third, the whole  “ good riddance, yay!” song-and-dances don’t highlight those big untouched issues. It glosses over them, making it too easy to declare victory and go on home. The money in politics issue is not about individual people. It’s about a complex process.

“Whew” replaces “It’s only just begun.”

Fourth, the Luke case trains us to accept delay as the natural scheme of things rather than something made by people failing at their jobs. 

Despite grumbling, we’ve been trained to accept delay. That pushes the question of “why the hell did it take so long?” away from the forefront.